


The Shadows of Paris

by immortal_conclusions



Category: Interview With the Vampire (1994), Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Anal Sex, Angst, Catholicism, Classical Music, Depression, Dissociation, Fluff, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Historical, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Lestat is a sweetheart, M/M, Memories, Panic Attacks, Paris (City), San Francisco, Slice of Life, Unhealthy Relationships, dubcon, louis and lestat bicker and it's hilarious, pre-asshole!Lestat, until he isn't
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:16:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28838409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/immortal_conclusions/pseuds/immortal_conclusions
Summary: Two nights in 1993. Louis watches a documentary on the AIDS crisis. Lestat reflects upon his life with Nicolas in Paris, and the blight of damnation.“My point is...” he swallowed, and he got a strange, faraway look in his eyes. He took one of my hands and held it, brushing his thumb over the blue veins on the back of my hand. He sighed. “I understand. To some degree, though perhaps not perfectly, what it had been like for you as a mortal man. When you were living in Paris.“And I understand,” he whispered, looking pointedly into my eyes. “…some measure of what you lost.”
Relationships: Lestat de Lioncourt/Louis de Pointe du Lac, Nicolas de Lenfent/Lestat de Lioncourt
Comments: 19
Kudos: 53





	The Shadows of Paris

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by the song The Shadows of Paris by Elisie Bianchi
> 
> Here’s a playlist which follows the work more or less chronologically:
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5SNxHWcmpJikUdgUsRY1oy?si=20w5tidrSz6kRMVgdva7Bw
> 
> This work was in part inspired by the grand epic which is Gulfport: A British Petroleum Fanfic by hw_campbell_jr. Hands down the greatest VC fanfic ever written. Nicolas is one of my favorite characters in VC, and I wanted to explore his relationship with Lestat with a similar lens in mind, as well as explore the origins of some of Lestat’s insecurities. More generally this is about reactions to trauma (both individual and collective), and how they may affect group identification.

“You sense my loneliness, " I answered, "my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I'm evil, that I don't deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don't stop me…. I’m too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that's all."

\- Lestat de Lioncourt, _The Vampire Lestat_

“I’m interested in nostalgia, especially when it’s tainted by self-deception.”

\- Elizabeth McKenzie

***

_New Orleans_ , _1993_

Listen up, darlings, I have something to tell you.

Louis said something recently that perturbed me. Well, most everything he says rather perturbs me, in one way or another, but this one was particular in the way it has occupied my thoughts for the past few days. He was sitting on the sofa, wrapped up in a hideous sweater with his knees to his chest, and he had been watching a documentary on the television. Innocuous circumstances, one would think. And then he said the thing that he said, and it has been in mind ever since.

More on that in a minute. You do need some context, and I will never hesitate to provide it. My time with Nicolas, who you’ll recall was my lover when I was still a mortal man, is something I don’t like to think about often. I suppose it is still too painful. More than two hundred years have passed since I lost him of course, and yet sometimes it feels a fresh wound. This sometimes makes me think of Claudia, my darling daughter, the other great wound to my heart. The way she aged in mind and intellect, although in spirit, somehow, she remained arrested in the state of a child. Even when she had surpassed all her tutors in their skill, even when she could recite Shakespeare and banter with Louis about the most esoteric of philosophers, there remained a childish petulance about her. I suppose petulance is the wrong word. For it was not a flaw of her character; she could not help it. She was helpless, and fearful. She could dissect the finest details of Kant or Hume, or whoever else Louis made her read, and yet when she wanted something badly enough, she would break that eerie silence to throw a tantrum and cry and beg. Like a child.

Anyways, I am going on a tangent again (Louis says I do this often; I can practically _see_ his red markings in the margins of my manuscript. Yes, he does still edit with an ink pen, despite all the marvels of modern digital word processing). The point is (and yes darling, despite my penchant for the ornate, I still do appreciate a good direct point), I find myself in a position not unlike that of my daughter. For even though two hundred years have passed, in some ways my mind is still that of a twenty-one year old boy: brash, foolish, and in love with Nicolas. I am, as I suppose one might say in the modern parlance, “not over it.”

This will not be news to any of you, my dear readers. I do not mean to insult your intelligence. For it is well known that I sought out Louis, my great love, in part because he seemed an apparition of Nicki. A spirit who would soothe my sorrow and mete out my punishment in equal parts. That story is well known. And all of you know the results of that blessed, fatal error, how much I reaped from it and how dearly I paid for it, and I shall not go into that here.

(He is glaring at me, by the way. Well, it is his fault for staring over my shoulder as I typed that out. I blew him a kiss and now he’s settled back on the couch with his worn copy of Deleuze or whoever-the-fuck, glaring at me over the pages when he thinks I’m not looking. Like a disaffected kitten, with his hair all mussed like that. No harm done.)

Where was I? Oh yes.

Much of my story with Nicolas has been told before, and I will describe some of it again here, although the astute among you will notice some differences in the telling. Is that because I told it one way the first time, and a different way now? Or is it the same story, just seen in another shading? Instances matter, my dear, and mutability is the essence of vitality. You will no doubt complain: this part is different, Lestat! Why did you not tell us everything before? Do you just make it all up as you go along? (The answer is no to that last one, although I wish I could). But do I owe you complete disclosure? Who are you to ask for it? _Well?_ Read for yourself and then see if you can justify your answer.

This little story is also about damnation. Damnation, as a subject, is something I have always been wholly uninterested in. It is dreary, and any discussion of it is doomed to descend into tautology and intractable tangles of cause and effect. Since my youth, I have always preferred to just get on with life, to spite whatever existential threat awaits around the corner by doing positively anything _else_ that I want, and doing it well. I run headlong through eternity, creating my own fate with sheer force of will. Furthermore, I have never been the type of person who is able to keep anything hidden. I have always lived brazenly, boldly. This has gotten me into trouble numerous times, the most recent and perhaps notable example being when I revealed the true nature of our vampiric kind to the world, nearly destroying us in the process.

But, for whatever reason, damnation is something that some of the people I love have been endlessly preoccupied by. (I suppose that by putting up with them, I have grown to believe in purgatory). _That_ interests me: why are some people preoccupied by sin and damnation, and others are not? Particularly, why are the people that I love preoccupied by it, and what does that say about _me_?

(I know how that sounds; I promise I am not being entirely self-centered - although there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Louis always tells me that I must reflect upon myself and my actions more, and dammit, I am doing just that.) But it brings me to the following question: _Why does damnation so often have to do with love?_

I don’t mean that in the banal, literary sense. Everyone who’s lived twenty years, let alone two hundred, knows that that to fall in love is to subject oneself to pain. One simply follows the other – it is practically a law of nature, and a very Louis-ish one at that. No my dear, I’m talking about something far more sinister than that. Something pervasive throughout time and history; something as potent as the Dark Trick but far more chameleon in appearance. Don’t know what I mean? Well, darling, neither do I. Not yet. Isn’t that apparent? I’m not too vain to admit it.

So, you see, as I was saying, Louis watched a documentary on the television. It was about the AIDS crisis.

One would think our kind would have a particular interest in this topic, solely for the fact that it is an affliction of the blood, and one that may pass between mortals and change them physically, irreversibly, to the point of death. I do not need to spell that out any further.

Beyond that, one might think it was of personal interest to me, for a variety of reasons I also need not spell out. But I was _preoccupied_ , you see, in the eighties. I was The Vampire Lestat. I was shiny, powerful, beautiful, rich. I was a star; I was exceptional. And furthermore, I was facing the imminent threat on my own kind, from the mother of all vampires, no less. To say I was occupied is an understatement. How could I have brought myself to be concerned with a trivial matter of mortal sickness?

But hadn’t I been a mortal man, once? I had been poor and hungry once, wept over heartbreak, chafed under the eyes of others. Yet each and every one of those mortals I’d known in my youth have all rotted away with the passage of history. As these emaciated men on the television screen were, or would soon be.

 _I_ would never wither, _I_ would never fade with the passage of time. This fact, and perhaps this fact alone, guaranteed that I would always see my revenge enacted. Nobody could ever wrong _me_.

_What did any of it matter?_

My motivation for writing always seems to come back to Louis, doesn’t it? Most of the time I’m perfectly content to flit around unbothered, moving fluidly amongst you unsuspecting mortals. To travel and spend money and indulge myself in all the pleasures of the world. I need little else. Well, you know that’s not entirely true. Everyone knows that the one thing I love more than my Louis is an audience. So, grab your popcorn or your wine or your right hand, whatever pleases your flighty mortal fancy, and read on.

On the night in question, I came home from my hunt around 10 PM, lavender Walkman in hand. My earphones blared the tracks of Painkiller by Judas Priest. I had on a black leather jacket above a tastefully faded Iron Maiden t-shirt. My fitted denim jeans were a pristine and blinding white without a drop of blood spilled on them. I had on my sunglasses of course, complementing my Walkman in color and style, although I took them off before entering the flat. I wanted Louis to see my eyes in all their glory. Averse to playing with his food as he is, I can always count on him to be home before I am.

I checked my reflection in the hall mirror. I looked like a cross between a boyband darling and a tastefully disaffected punk rocker. I mussed my hair a little and pouted my lips. Yes. Perfect. Perfect for a grand entrance. Nothing less for my dearest fledgling. Then I burst into the living room. “Louis! I’m home!”

Louis was watching the television, sitting on the sofa with his back to me. This in itself was not unusual. He likes to watch documentaries and moody French films with a lot of weird sex, and even, _Mon Dieu_ , the _news_. Still, I expected him to turn around and greet me.

I dropped my hands and let my earbuds clatter to the ground. “ _Louis_.”

“Be quiet, Lestat. I’m busy.”

I sighed and put down my things on the unused kitchen island. The narrator of Louis’ television program was speaking in a grave voice.

“ _On June 5, 1981, the first official government report on AIDS was released. It described an unknown syndrome involving pneumonia and other infections, as well as pronounced physical wasting._ ”

I squinted. “Didn’t you say Daniel had that? Before he was turned?”

“It’s entirely possible. Although I wouldn’t go asking him, if I were you. It’s not considered polite…”

I toed off my shoes and then walked over to him. On the screen, they were showing photographs of emaciated men, their eyes sunken in and their collarbones jutting out. Some had skin covered in dark welts. Others were shown clinging to life in hospital beds. They looked like the plague victims I’d seen in the 19th century, or like victims of those 20th century disasters I’d read about when I’d woken from my sleep and been keen to skim over the decades I’d missed. Louis was frowning a bit.

No, it was more than that. He looked _genuinely_ upset. His eyes were round and dark, and there was that little crease of distress between his brows. His mouth was pressed into a line.

I scoffed, almost embarrassed by his obvious display of emotion. “Since when have we mourned the deaths of mortals?” 

“Their bravery…it touches me.” His voice was quiet, solemn.

I burst out laughing, and he shot me a most vicious glare. He turned the volume on the TV up excessively high, to drown me out.

I snatched the remote from him and turned it back down, slowly regaining control from my laughing fit. I saw him grit his teeth. When I’d sobered enough, I asked him, “don’t you think they are damned? That they are sinners? Isn’t that what you think?”

He was silent a moment. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “Though if they are, certainly less than you and I are.”

I chuckled. “ _Them_. You say _them_ , as if we are not that way as well.”

“What way?”

I raised an eyebrow.

He gave me a _look_. “Well, we are not. We are outside time, as you so often tell me. You never care for human history, or politics, or any of it. Why would it ever concern _you_?”

I shrugged. “Mortals can be amusing. Observing them can be great fun. But I never let myself get depressed about them. Live and let die and all that. I’m not a martyr. And _you’re_ not either,” I added pointedly.

He pursed his lips. “They call this disease…some of the things they say about it…they speak of it as if it is a punishment. And I cannot help but wonder if that is…” his voice trailed off. “They called it the gay plague. And then, and then, over a hundred thousand dead since 1981. Imagine it, Lestat. President Reagan literally forbade his Surgeon General from speaking about the disease, at a time when research and education could have saved tens of thousands a year. Entire communities were decimated. My old neighborhood in San Francisco – it has practically become a ghost town over the past decade. Do you—do you see why I do not adhere to your logic of preying on evil-doers? Humans use that logic all the time, they sanction so called evil-doers to die for a…twisted and arbitrary morality.”

“And what is that morality?”

Louis shrugged one shoulder. “There was a petition sent to President Carter which said, ‘God’s judgment is going to fall on America as on other societies that allowed homosexuality to become a protected way of life.’ I suppose you could say they do not condone…alternative lifestyles.”

I laughed wickedly. “Well, not to get _political_ , Louis, but I have no such condition for my prey. I’m a man of the Enlightenment, not of this era of postmodern Protestantism, or whatever it is.”

 _A war zone_ , a man was saying on the television. _It was a war zone, but most of us had never lived in one. We never knew who among us would be struck down next_. _Life seemed to be split into a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ In 1980, life was…carefree and innocent for us…By 1985, most of my friends and family were infected. By 1990, most of us were dead._

“Am I interrupting you? It’s still going on, you see.” I gestured at the television. See, I am very courteous! Never be me to get between a man and his entertainment!

“Oh, don’t worry. I am recording it so I can watch it again later.”

“Oh, _Louis_. That’s macabre, even for you.”

“You don’t get it, do you,” he snarled. “You’re as dense and brainless as ever.”

I clenched my teeth. I ought to set something on fire for that, I thought. Perhaps his precious television. (Which, by the way, I had bought.) Just to show that I could. To remind him that it was me he was dealing with, that the real thing he had to fear here was _me_.

It was probably some masochistic desire of his that made him want to watch it in the first place. He was enthralled by the physical representation of punishment for whatever it was he believed he had in common with these indigents. He was probably getting off on it, in that twisted mind of his.

“ _Really_ Louis,” I said, somewhat unkindly. “One would think that after all this time, you would have accepted it. At least come to terms with it.”

He shook his head. “It’s not that. I do…I have…of course I have accepted it, this, this _thing_ between us.” He gestured his hand vaguely in my direction. When I just gazed at him expectantly, he went on. “And not just the thing between us. You mustn’t think that I, that I never came to terms with the fact that I…”

When his voice faltered and he pursed his lips, I rolled my eyes. “Out with it Louis. Your ramblings try my patience. Just say it.”

He closed his eyes, his face oddly placid. “That I like men.” It sounded so simple, the way he said it. His voice was quiet, barely above a whisper, and that was the only indication of his shame. I wondered how much it had cost him to say it.

“Of course,” he went on, “one cannot entirely extrapolate the condition of mortals to beings such as us. Male and female vampires alike take blood, and can offer it. I’m not sure that matters of sexuality can be defined for us as they would be for mortal men.”

I sat down next to him on the sofa. “And when you were mortal?”

“I…” again he faltered. “I suppose I never allowed myself to think on it much.”

I laughed. “How very like you.”

His nostrils flared slightly and his lips thinned but he did not speak. He sighed and turned back to the television, long fingers moving idly over the rectangular rubber buttons of the remote. Oh, how I enjoy making him uncomfortable.

I propped an elbow against the back of the sofa and rested my head in my hands. I was about to speak again, launch into yet another canned sarcastic tirade, but he beat me to it.

“I suppose…I suppose I denied myself the opportunity to know. You were, after all, the first man I…”

“And then I made you a vampire and you lived happily ever after. The end.”

He rolled his eyes so hard they momentarily appeared completely white. Oh, Louis. I chuckled and tucked a strand of his hair behind his ear.

“They do still _see_ us that way. Mortals, I mean. I know that your powers of observation on any subject other than yourself are…lacking at best, but you must recognize the way that we seem to them. Two men of uncertain relation, living together. Sharing a bed. You even hold my hand in the streets.” He made a face. “And you kiss me. In public.”

“Such a fiend, I am.” My eyes gleamed.

“Not the point.”

“So? If anyone gives you trouble for it, you could slit his throat. Do not forget, dear Louis, that _we_ are the monsters.”

I expected that to rile him up, of course. To remind him, blatantly, of his own vile station. I expected a harsh look at the very least, if not a shout. Instead, he just looked vaguely troubled.

“Don’t you remember? It was not enough to simply feed on them. You had to have your quadroon balls, your outings at the theater, your galleries. We had to be so careful so that people would not ask questions about the three of us. Can you imagine what would have happened to us if, _if_ —they would have tried to take her away from us, at the very least. And yes, perhaps we could have killed them and escaped and gone to live somewhere else. But that would not have suited you, would it? Being on the run like that. No, that would not have suited you at all.”

“Of course I know that,” I said scathingly. “I am not as _dense_ as you believe. But you’re missing the point. The point is, we have the upper hand. Always. You, _you_ , honestly can’t be frightened of mortals. That’s pathetic. You’re pathetic, Louis.”

He turned back to the television. His shoulders raised and his arms came around himself. I could see I had hurt him. I didn’t care.

“We’re literally killers.”

“Yes, but we don’t…this disease is different because…” He rubbed the bridge of his nose and his temples. He sighed heavily. “I suppose I’m trying to say it’s not systemic. We kill as individuals, and horrible as that is, it’s not the result of an organized effort to eliminate a particular population on moral grounds.”

“You _could_ argue we prey disproportionately on the poor or the weak.”

He grimaced. “Don’t pretend you care about that when you’re not trying to win an argument.”

I smirked. “You have me there.”

“But do you see what I’m saying?” He gestured rather wildly with his hands, a sharp contrast from how composed and sparing in movements he usually was. It was, for some reason, vitally important to him that I understand whatever academic distinction he was trying to make.

“You just said they were damned.”

“I did _not.”_ Suddenly, Louis got an odd look in his eyes. Dare I say, it was almost predatory. He inclined his head. “Did Nicolas think he was damned? Did he think you were?”

Fiercely, the memory came to me. Of drinking Nicki’s blood, of tasting the shame in him. How deeply he had hated himself, how he had hated _me_ even as he professed to love me. How he had intended for me to die in the gutter with him, how in the end I was merely the _instrument_ of his damnation.

“That’s not any of your business,” I snapped. “But even if it were, which it’s not, why in the hell would any of it matter? Do you not recognize the…absurdity of this discussion? Us circling round and round, and what does any of it matter, anyways, to us?”

“You seem to think it does.” He glanced at me from beneath his fingers. “I seem to have struck a nerve.”

“Oh, fuck you, Louis.” I was silent for a moment. “And besides, that was an entirely different time. People are so liberated, nowadays.”

Louis arched an eyebrow. “Are they, _monsieur_.”

“I’m going out, _mon cher_. When I return, do let me know if you have an update on the condition of our souls.”

“I’ll be sure to let you know.” Was that a smirk?

“Perhaps I shall go to one of their bars, tonight. I shall interview one of them, to find out what they really think of themselves,” I said haughtily, gesticulating wildly with my hands. “Say, _oh, I am a collector of stories, of lives, as they say, and you seem_ especially _interesting_ …”

It was a low blow, I knew it. Louis gave me a scathing look. For a moment it thrilled me, regret and disdain molded evenly across his exquisite features, but then, as if knowing how it thrilled me, he returned his eyes pointedly to his book. He turned a page with a heavy sigh, smoothing his face into a mask of indifference. I left in a huff, slamming the door as I went.

_Did Nicolas think he was damned? Did he think you were?_

The next night, I rose early. I dressed in a pair of tight-fitting black waxed jeans and bold colorblocked cashmere turtleneck beneath a crisp denim jacket. Once I had my purple sunglasses affixed to my face I was ready to go. I drove the Porsche to one of my many storage units scattered across the city. I couldn’t quite remember which was the correct one…my personal effects accumulated over so many years are so difficult to keep track of. Regardless, I had a good feeling about the one on Poydras Street, in the Central Business District.

Successful in my endeavor, I returned home quickly with the two bulky objects I had procured. I didn’t even stop to hunt, which I knew I might regret later. But there was a far more pressing matter at hand.

The flat was empty when I returned; Louis must have been out on his own hunt. I set down the two boxes in front of the grand piano, and regarded them. Eventually, I opened them. I took the violin from it’s velvet case. Remarkably, none of the strings had broken after all of this time, and they were only moderately out of tune. The wonders of modern climate control. I plucked it to tune it, my vampiric ears easily finding the resonances of perfect fifths. I prepared the bow with rosin, and set it down next to the violin. I slid open the keylid of the piano and stilted up the soundboard cover to the precise angle I liked. Then I opened the other parcel, a large dusty cardboard box filled to the brim with sheet music. Some of the papers near the bottom were falling apart with age, _centuries_ of age, the bindings undone and the edges moth-eaten. The volumes nearer to the top were newer, collected since the eighties. The covers bore the titles of the pieces and the names of the composers, as well as the names of those great 20th century publishing houses: Schirmer, International, Henle Verlag. They were totally disorganized - I was not a fucking _librarian_ like Louis, but I would be able to find the scores I was looking for easily enough. This was not strictly necessary - my vampiric memory allows me to memorize almost any piece of music I’ve ever played instantly and permanently - but tonight I needed my concentration to be elsewhere.

I looked about the room. It was a chapel, it was a mausoleum. It was a battlefield ready. I took a breath.

Then, I began to play.

_Paris, 1781._

The room was little more than a garret.

It was on the top floor of a drafty, rickety building, with narrow stairs and a sticky handrail, and was the fifth place we had looked. There was a thin mattress on the small bed and a single three-legged table with a single candle beside it. A chipped ceramic washbasin stood on an iron frame in the corner. It was a windy day, and I could hear the draft whistle around the seams of the window. The sloped roof plunged low on one side of the tiny room. The roughly hewn floorboards were uneven below our feet.

Nicolas sighed heavily at me. He still wore his navy blue travelling cloak and strands of his curling brown hair had come free from his ribbon. We were both exhausted and hungry; our last proper meal had been at the house of the livery stable when we’d arrived in Paris two nights ago. He shook his head and gestured around at the room. “You are the _Marquis de Auvergne_. And you want to live like this.”

I rolled my eyes. “I am _not._ I am the youngest son of an enfeebled house, and a disgraced son at that. I will live as I please.”

After a moment, he half-smiled at me. “You amuse me so, Lestat.”

I tossed my head and looked at him from under my lashes. “I know more than one way to do that,” I murmured. I traced a finger down his lapel.

We heard a creak at the top step outside the door, and Nicki stepped back away from me at once. I turned and saw the landlady, who had returned. She was stout with a ruddy face, and wore a stained apron over her faded gingham dress. She smelled faintly of sour milk.

She crossed her thick arms and frowned. “So you’ve got a look at the place?”

“Yes,” I said. “We believe it will do quite nicely for us.”

“For the both of you?”

“Yes. We are brothers,” I proclaimed, slinging an arm around Nicolas’ shoulders.

The landlady stared at us a moment and huffed. We looked nothing alike, of course; my golden hair and pale grey eyes contrasted sharply with his dark looks. Perhaps she could tell herself that we were half-brothers; perhaps one of us was a bastard son. I’d noticed that oftentimes if you held your tongue and gave away little, people would make up these sorts of little banal stories to tell themselves in the absence of an explanation. It almost always worked in my favor. I grinned at her beatifically, knowing how infectious my charm could be, and that middle-aged women were certainly not immune.

“From the Auvergne,” Nicki put in. He clapped his hand on my back, brotherly indeed.

“And what is your work?”

I lifted my chin. “I am an actor, and Nicolas is a musician. A great violinist. He shall be playing in the Opéra-Comique.” I had seen a poster advertising the famed company on a street post. I felt Nicki squirm slightly at my side.

“ _Artistes._ ” She made a face.

“We will pay the rent on time, Madame,” Nicki said earnestly.

She looked at us skeptically, but nodded after a moment, her thick neck bobbing under the weight of her chin. Perhaps she noticed that we were rather better dressed than her typical tenants. Or that we were both exceedingly handsome. “Very well. You are not the worst looking vagrants to come through here…”

“Well, that was easy enough!” I said brightly.

Nicki looked grim. “Lestat, I haven’t even auditioned for any orchestra yet, let alone the Opéra-Comique!”

I patted his hand. “What’s a little white lie? Besides, they would be fools not to have you.”

He gave me a faint smile but he did not meet my eyes. He shouldered his violin case. “Well at least we now have a place to stay, and a place where I can practice.”

That first night we tumbled into bed together and made wild, happy love. I remember he sucked my cock. He was very good at it. His mouth was wet and feverishly hot, and his tongue stroked along the underside of me. Obscene. His hands braced against my hips and he took me deep into his throat. I threw back my head and looked up at the plaster ceiling. A _real plaster ceiling_! In _Paris! God!_ I grabbed his shoulders and came so hard my vision whited out. 

“Damn you, Lestat. How good you taste,” His voice was hoarse. He swallowed again, thickly, his flushed eyelids fluttering shut.

I pulled him to me and kissed him, tasting myself on his tongue. “I love you,” I told him.

He pressed his face to my neck and I could feel his soft smile against my skin. “Let me have you now,” he whispered.

For the most part, that first month we were nothing but cold and hungry.

It was winter then, and the chill was relentless. Our small fireplace seemed to let in as much cold as the fire expelled, and our single window let in a howling draft around the seams. We had only enough money to afford two rough wool blankets, which we layered over each other and lay beneath at night, shivering. The mattress was made of straw and very lumpy, and most days I woke with some ache or another.

Very quickly the money from my mother’s jewels ran out, and we were very nearly starving. We could only afford the smallest loaves of bread, the thinnest wine. But I was in paradise. The bread was _Parisian_ bread, the wine was _Parisian_ wine. That simple fact alone made it taste divine.

He’d managed to bring along a few finely tailored clothes from his father the draper, and I of course had my wolfskin coat. These we tried to wear sparingly, saving them for when we’d really need them. Luckily he and I were nearly the same size, and we could share what little else we had.

Every night we talked for hours, late into the night. We would sit on our bed in the candlelight, sometimes drinking, sometimes just holding each other and laughing. We barely slept at all, those first few weeks, for the simple fact that there was no longer any infringement upon our Conversation. We talked and kissed and laughed and drank and made love, and slept curled tightly against each other. The candle burned down to its nub almost every night. There was nobody to wonder where we were, nobody to yell for us and berate us. There was only Him, the sole center of my life. He was mine and I was his, and we lived in blissful awareness of this fact.

I tried to convey this to my mother when I sent her letters. I tried to describe everything to her, in fact, all the sounds and the sights of Paris, this incredible milieu. But there were, of course, things I could not say to the Italian scribe in les Innocents, whom I paid my paltry coins. I wanted badly to tell her of my love for Nicki. I wanted to tell _somebody - everybody!_ Certainly my own dear mother! But of course I could not, and tried to make up for this by describing everything else I had seen that much more vividly and expressively. Perhaps she would read between the lines and see from the effusiveness of my description that there was no other explanation than the fact that I was in love - how else could the world look so exquisite?

The scribe seemed to write slower than I spoke, however, and the finished page was never quite filled.

Still, I didn’t care! I all but ran through the streets, in the sunlight, along the river, through the markets. I roamed amongst the sailors singing at the docks and the builders slinging plaster and the shopmaids bickering from their stalls. I was happy to be alive! I was happy to be alive, and in love with Nicolas, and free!

No longer was I trapped under the thumb of my tyrannical father and brothers or the provincial attitudes of the village-folk. Paris was an entire city teeming with outcasts; built from the sum total of their hopes. The very curves of the streets and the facades of buildings seemed to be works of art, and windows on every street were brightly lit at night. Even in the night, no darkness could touch me here. 

Living together, Nicolas suited each other surprisingly well. Or perhaps it is only so in my memory. Each morning as I awoke it was a wonder to feel him next to me in the bed, and I thought I’d never get over the surprise. I’d caress him and he’d smile at me as he floated into consciousness, and then more often than not we’d be overcome with passion. We were, after all, young mortal men, and our appetites for the flesh were almost boundless. After we finished, on days we were especially hungry, Nicki’s eyes would flash fiendishly as he licked his hand and commended the “breakfast” we’d given each other. Eventually we’d make it out of bed and wash and shave together, crowded close by the basin and the single small pewter mirror we had propped against the wall. He would splash me with water and I would laugh and try to steal a kiss.

We walked together arm in arm on the streets in the blistering cold, passing the flagon of wine or cognac back and forth between us. We idled in cafés, pressed together in the corner while we whispered increasingly ridiculous made-up stories about the patrons. There were Golden Moments. Moments where our conversation flowed as easily as water, or perhaps wine, and it seemed nothing could divert our admiration of each other. There was nothing more beautiful or intimate than the embrace of our thoughts, except perhaps the embrace of our bodies. I was blissfully happy. I thought he and I would live forever like that.

And Nicolas played his violin.

I watched him from the bed. He took out his bow first, tightened the horsehairs on it with the little screw at the base of the bow. Then he took out his piece of rosin wrapped in a soft cloth, a deep amber color and worn dull from use. He applied this to the horsehairs with long even strokes. I watched his long fingers move with so much care, always so much care. I’d never have such patience, I thought. He was just as fastidious in preparing his bow as he was with my body when we made love…

Next he placed an embroidered linen cloth over his left shoulder. He lifted the violin from its case, and raised it into position over the cloth. The varnished wood gleamed. It had a mottled reddish hue and the candlelight danced over its curves.

“Can you teach me to play?” I came up behind him and kissed his spine.

He smiled and shook his head. His curls brushed against my face and I inhaled the faint scent of bergamot in them. “Too difficult. Especially to start at such an age, Lord knows I’ve had a time with it. Besides. It’ll take me a hundred years to learn everything there is to learn about the violin. To learn every piece, to master every technique. It’s no small feat.”

I hooked my chin over his shoulder. “I’d wager in a hundred years I could become as good as you are now,” I said fondly.

“Perhaps, _chéri_.”

I lounged on the bed then, and watched him practice for a while. I often did this. It was mesmerizing to watch him, first his fiddling with the rosewood pegs as he tuned, the lush sounds of the open strings filling our small room. Then he would move on to scales, deliberately slow at first, and then faster and faster, until his fingers were flying up and down the ebony fingerboard like frenetic dancers.

He played some French études, then Corelli’s La Folia (a favorite of his for busking on the street corners, as it had a simple sailor’s melody and many interchangeable variations. “It means _madness_ ,” he told me with a small smile). A bit of a Bach sonata, rich with chords. Mozart’s 4th concerto.

He was so beautiful when he played. All the light in the room seemed to coalesce around him; he became the source of it. His dark hair shone in the candlelight. The strong lines of his body moved sinuously with the music: delicate, restrained, but powerful. His lower lip jutted slightly to the side in concentration, and this small asymmetry only served to highlight the perfection of his face: the smooth bridge of his nose, his high cheekbones, the dark shadow of his lashes. I was mesmerized. I remember there was something soft and indistinct about him, as if he were rendered in oil pastels.

And the sound - ah, the sound! He pulled it from the strings, rich and dark and sinuous. It rose from his violin and echoed around the room, filling it completely. Each resonance built upon the previous until I felt the whole of human experience must be contained within it. Every possible color, emotion, vision. It absorbed me completely; I thought of nothing else. I thought his music would be my salvation.

I couldn’t fathom how his father had threatened to break his hands. How could anyone want to harm this boy, this beautiful man, from whom poured such divine music? How could anyone hear it and not practically grovel in devotion? I could not understand it.

Still, I could tell it wasn’t easy for him. He’d spend hours each day on his scales and études, trying to make up for what he perceived as a lack of technique. Often he’d get frustrated and let out great heaving sighs, proclaiming that he would never amount to anything and should just give up. I could see that it ate at him. The very purpose of his daily practice sessions was to systematically identify these flaws and exorcise them, and it was a cruel task. To be confronted daily and systematically with one’s own inadequacy was a special kind of torture. I could see it in him even then – that desperation. He thought that if he could be perfect, it might save him. Might not his sins be excused if he could create art beautiful enough to serve as a counterweight?

He’d forget to eat, just taking swigs of thin wine, and insisting that he needed to play a passage just one more time, change just one more fingering. Sometimes I’d grasp his hand and examine his fingers after he’d been practicing for hours; the fingertips of his left hand were calloused and each one had a gray slash running diagonally across the center of the pad. He smiled and insisted it didn’t hurt. I kissed his fingertips anyways.

He’d stay up late many nights copying down scores on parchment with the quill pen he’d brought from Auvergne, by the light of a single candle. “I can hear it in my head, the way it’s supposed to sound,” he said to me. “But I…I can never make it sound that way.”

“You can, Nicki,” I insisted. “I believe in you.”

He scoffed and shook his head. “It’s hopeless, Lestat.”

As everyone knows, I was soon hired as a stagehand at Renaud’s, a small theater on Boulevard du Temple. The work was menial. But the people I met there were so vibrant and full of life. There was one young actress in particular whose beauty instantly caught my eye. Her name was Angèle. She had long reddish-brown hair, curling to the level of her waist. She was slender, with the swell of her breasts visible beneath her delicate bodice.

She blushed and bowed her head demurely as she approached me. “I will show you the backstage, Monsieur.”

“Please, call me Lestat,” I purred, and tossed my head of blond curls. There was no harm in a little flirting. I wanted to see her reaction.

She gave me a small conspiratory smile, and offered me her hand.

It was not only Angèle who was smitten with me. Nearly all the young actresses, and even one or two of the young actors, showed me favor. On any given day, at any time, I could seek out at least one person who would flirt with me shamelessly. This turned out to be very useful, and it made my jobs of preparing the dressing rooms and emptying chamber pots to be slightly less tedious. _What would Father think of me now!_ I thought with glee. Here I was, a little Lord, a fallen aristocrat, emptying chamber pots for theater actors. Pouring wine for commoners, and drinking and dancing with them, nearly every night. And I basked in it! I basked in the attention and the absurdity and the degeneracy of it all. It felt almost as good as falling into Nicki’s arms every night.

But I was not to remain a stagehand. It was only a matter of months before Renaud approached me one evening and said, "All right, Lestat, tonight we need you as Lelio. Now you ought to know what to do."

I was handed a worn parchment script. I’d already practically memorized the script of Lelio from ardently watching the performances each night, but I was still filled with dread - I had told them I could read, but the lines on the page were meaningless to me. I rushed home and told Nicki. He laughed and kissed me and read my lines aloud so that I could practice. That evening, trembling with anticipation, I dressed in his best velvet coat and affixed a pasteboard sword to my side.

“Angèle!” Renaud said an hour before I was set to go on. “Show Monsieur de Valois how to do his makeup.”

She applied a thick white paint to my face followed by a pale powder. A dusting of rouge on my cheeks and my lips. Lined my eyes with kohl. Then she took a thin grease pencil and drew two fine curling lines above my lip in the suggestion of a moustache. I smirked and mimed a kiss at her as she did it, and she blushed a deep scarlet which ran all the way down to her breasts.

I looked at myself in the mirror when she was finished. The makeup had accentuated my fine features, making them seem almost bold and exotic. I was a caricature of myself. Something garish and vulgar. Although from afar, from the audience, traipsing amongst the equally vulgar late Rococò decorations, I knew I would merely look healthy and vibrant. I would look even more human than I already was.

And thus I became Lelio.

After the performance, the thunderous applause of the audience rang in my ears. “Valois!” Renaud clapped me on the back. “You’ve done well enough. I suppose I can let you go on regularly from now on.” I barely heard his words. I was buoyed on a sea of triumph as two of the actresses led me backstage to where the white paint would come off and the revelry would begin.

Nicki was there, having come up from the pit of the orchestra where he had performed. He grasped me by my forearms and twirled me about once, twice. Our frock coats rose gracefully with the momentum.

He drew close to me and whispered, “magnificent.” He kissed the tip of my nose.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Angèle watching us in her mirror as she dabbed the makeup off her porcelain face, a curious look in her blue eyes. When she saw me staring, she smiled shyly at me.

I dragged Nicki over to her. I couldn’t resist the doubled attention. “ _Angèle, mon amour, c’est Nicolas, mon autre amour._ ” I giggled and cinched my arm around his waist, brushing a kiss to his cheek.

Nicolas stiffened. “You are—you are drunk,” he managed.

I laughed heartily, emboldened by the bewildered, amused expression on Angèle’s face. “You worry too much. We are among friends, are we not?” I knelt behind Angèle’s chair and pushed her loose curls aside, pressing kisses to her smooth neck. The rogue still on my lips left little red marks there. I kept my eyes on Nicki. “Doesn’t he worry too much, Angèle?”

She squirmed a little under my touch, raising one shoulder which only gave me another place to kiss. I could feel the blush rise beneath her skin. “He does,” she breathed.

Nicki frowned. He tapped his foot against the floor once, twice. He crossed his arms. “Are you quite finished, Lestat?” Ah, yes. Jealousy was a sharp undercurrent in his voice. I had succeeded.

I pressed once last lascivious kiss to Angèle’s cheek, making her giggle. I leaned back and admired my work, the rouge marks almost like bloodied bruises against that pale flushed skin. She would have to scrub them off later; that image pleased me. Then I stood and went back to Nicki. I put my hands on his shoulders, thinking I would kiss him on the mouth. But the dark expression in his eyes stilled me. I settled for embracing him instead, leaning my head on his shoulder for a brief moment.

“ _Later_ ,” he whispered darkly in my ear. I shivered at the barely disguised lust in his voice. “Fuck you.”

“Fuck you,” I murmured back lightly, flicking my eyes up to his. After a significant look, I grinned and pulled myself away from him.

The revelry and celebration went on for several hours. I danced with almost all of the theater girls and was given flowers and kisses, so many that they seemed to all blur together. I was handed glass after glass of wine. At some point I went to relieve myself in the back courtyard. As I returned to the party, I heard a woman’s voice.

“Lestat?”

It was Angèle. She emerged from the shadows of the hallway. Her hair was undone, and so were the top few laces of her chemise. She drew close to me. I inhaled. She smelled very good, some perfume I didn’t have a name for.

“Yes, chérie?”

I could see her blush even in the din. “I would very much like to kiss you,” she said. And then she did. Her mouth was warm against mine, and open. I was surprised by her boldness. She had always seemed so innocent. Perhaps it was the wine.

She took hold of my forearms and looked me in the eyes. “Would you like to come upstairs with me tonight, Lestat?”

I hesitated.

She leaned in close again. I could feel her warm breath against my face. Her breasts were nearly up against my chest, and I felt a warm shudder rise through me. “You were so magnificent, you deserve to be in someone’s arms tonight.”

Nicki. I remembered his promise, or his insinuation, from earlier. Had I not been thinking of him all evening, how I might pounce on him just after our door closed and tear off his clothes, and let him have his way with me? I had seen his furtive glances from across the room of the party, thick with jealousy and lust; I’d felt his fingertips hard on my waist as he brushed past me while we danced with women.

I brushed my lips to her ear. “Ah, in that regard I am already settled tonight, my love,” I whispered. “But perhaps we shall enjoy each other another time.”

She pulled back, smiling. “Whoever she is, she is a very lucky woman.”

“Indeed she is.” I smirked. Nicki would get a rise out of this when I told him.

But then Angèle surprised me. She gave me a curious glance. She cocked her head to one side, the curls falling against her cheek. “Or…is she a _he_?”

I laughed, and grabbed her face, and kissed her again. When I pulled away I was laughing still, nearly giddy with it. “Oh, Angèle, ma chérie, I will never tell! I must keep you all guessing about me, else I would lose some of my charm.”

She grinned. “Oh, Lestat, you will never lose your charm.”

“You are correct in that,” I told her, with a wink, and then we went to rejoin the festivity.

Nicki and I stumbled home together late that night. The moon was full and the cobblestone streets shone nearly as bright as they did in the day. The adrenaline from the performance and the revelry still ran through veins. I was giddy with excitement, and with the anticipation of what was surely to come next. Even Nicki seemed in better spirits. We chased each other through the streets, howling with raucous laughter. He caught me around the waist and I turned on him and kissed him on the lips in the middle of the empty street. I then turned and ran, but I could hear him laughing behind me. I was triumphant! Nothing could touch me.

I arrived at our shabby building first, and waited for him in the shadows behind the entryway. When he came up moments later, panting, I jumped out and hollered. He jumped a foot in the air, a stricken look on his face. He clapped a hand over his heart and stared at me. “ _Enfoiré!_ ”

I laughed. “Come on, Nicki, am I really that terrifying?”

He shook his head vigorously and cuffed me over the ears. “No more than a puppy, Lestat.”

I pouted. “Surely more than that. I can be very intimidating if I want to be.”

He smirked, leaning on the doorframe. “All right, Lestat. You are most terrifying. Want to come upstairs with me or not?”

I grinned. “ _Bien sûr_.”

Up in our garret room, I preened in front of the mirror. I still had the sash from my stage clothes beneath my frock coat, and some of the makeup remained on my face. My golden hair shone in the candlelight. I threw my head back and struck a pose. “Don’t I look magnificent?”

He took a swig of wine and grimaced. “Why are you asking me? Surely you got enough…validation from all those women you danced with.”

I dropped my pose. I could feel his mood beginning to sour again by the second. “Didn’t you enjoy dancing with all the beautiful girls?”

“No I did _not_ ,” he snapped.

I smirked. “So you do not fancy them?”

He scowled. “You _do_?”

I shrugged insolently. “Why not?”

“You just like attention,” he said. “You’re like a whore. You’ll love anyone who’ll give it to you.”

I laughed. “Perhaps. But you give it to me best of all.”

“Do I?” He had a dark look in his eyes. “Take off your clothes, then.”

I felt a hot curl of desire in my groin. But I tapped my foot, drunk on my insolence. “ _Non_.”

He seethed. “Do as I say, you brat.”

I raised my chin. “I am still your lord, Monsieur. Is that any way to speak to me?”

He slapped me. Somewhere in my mind I registered that it was a sharp pain, but in truth I barely felt it. I stood still for a moment, my limbs frozen and my breath caught in my chest. A cold adrenaline had spread through me. Then I regained control over myself. I blinked away the pricks of tears in my eyes. I turned to him, and laughed loudly, as if to banish away the horrible feeling, the chilling silence, and hit him as hard as I could.

He tussled with me for a moment, but we were both very drunk, and we stumbled, falling onto the bed. Then I kissed him. He took a shuddering breath, laced with desire, and I began to kiss down his throat. I pulled at the laces of his breeches.

Within a few minutes we were out of our clothes. I was on my knees on the bed and he behind me, his hands running up and down over my body and his lips on the back of my neck. I guided his hand to my cock. Despite my inebriation, it only took a few strokes for me to become fully hard. I arched into the circle of his hand. Then he pulled away, and I heard him shift on the bed.

I heard the wet sound of him slicking himself. Then, his hands on my hips, the blunt head of him pressed against me, behind my balls. Without warning, he forced himself into me.

I cried out in pain. Such a sharp, sharp pain. It overpowered any other possible sensation. For a moment I saw red and I wanted to kill him. “You will feel it tomorrow,” he told me, as he grabbed my wrists and held them behind me. “When you see your precious _Angèle_.”

“Damn you,” I snarled. It hurt my pride, but that’s all it was, I told myself. The physical pain I didn’t mind. He was right, I would feel it tomorrow and I would enjoy it. It would be another delicious secret, another mark of my status as a fallen angel. Another thing that nobody else would be able to see on me, that I knew alone. I determined to enjoy it. I gritted my teeth until the pain inevitably turned to searing pleasure, as I knew it would, as it always did.

He pushed my face down into the pillow, holding it there with his palm.

“Nicki...ah!”

He nipped at my ear. I felt the pain like one might hear sound if their ears were full of cotton. As if I wasn’t quite inside my body and was touching an imprint through a fine film. But the heat spread torridly through my face, down my chest, meeting the sharp heat shooting up from my groin. “ _You’re mine_ ,” he hissed.

A terrifying thrill went through me when he said that. To belong to someone, I thought, was surely the most terrifying thing in the world. And yet _how I wanted it_.

He screwed me into the bed until I was gasping his name.

And just like that, we began to move up in the world. We moved from our drafty garret into a proper room. We could afford good wine and bread, and once or twice a week we even had meat. The weather warmed as spring came and went, and we spent many nights wandering around the city streets together. We even scraped together enough money to see a proper Shakespearean play, which was something I’d heard the other actors rave about. I vaguely remembered my mother mentioning Shakespeare too. The play that night was Macbeth. Nicki and I went dressed in our finery, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I told my mother all about it in a letter.

_Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow!_

Money brought us other, smaller joys, too. Nicki bought a real music stand for him to practice with at home, and he could finally afford better quality strings and rosin. There was a special kind of new string which had just been developed in Paris. He came home with a set one day, informing me excitedly that these strings had a steel core wound in the center of the gut, making the sound the violin produced louder and more direct. Nicki raved about it for days. Together we bought finer clothes and warmer sheets for our bed. We could now afford oil instead of tallow for sex, and it felt positively luxurious by comparison. I went to the street markets and purchased a truly obscene quantity of candles, all of which I lit and thus filled our little home with light.

One afternoon, Nicolas and I lounged in bed. I lay next to him, one naked leg flung across his, and had my hand between his legs. His hand was over mine, feather light, and I could feel the calloused pads of his fingertips against my knuckles. Nicki had a magnificent cock. It was shapely and beautifully colored, and when erect stood tall and bold like a soldier readied for battle. Of course, my own was no less valiant, a fact which we both knew well. But the difference was, I could admire his as I might admire art. I could look upon it from any angle I wished, watching as the light streaming in from the windows reflected off the taut, shining head; more dully across the shaft. I could explore every curve and ridge of it indecently with my tongue. I could marvel at its rigidity, when he thrust it down my throat or up my ass.

This afternoon he fucked me against the windowsill, and I burned my eyes on the dying Parisian sunset. I felt the heat of the sun against the front of my body, the heat of Nicki at the back. Surrounded by warmth, run through with it. He had his hands on my hips, and I was exquisitely aware of the pressure of his fingertips. I felt the dull pressure of him inside me, filling me with a deep bloom of pleasure. He lifted one of my thighs, holding it up with effort so that he was pressed flush against me. I gasped. There was a vague disquiet lancing through the pleasure, almost a sense of nausea, for a brief moment. But then I felt his lips against my neck, and I relaxed to him, letting him fuck me as he wanted. This yielding, this unexpected joy at being taken and penetrated to the point of delirium…it had been unfamiliar to me in my life up until my love affair with him. I had always been the man of action. The instigator. But somehow, something about him and the way I loved him, made me think at that moment that there was no greater pleasure in the world. I gasped and cried as I came, rutting up and smearing the windowpane with my seed.

He always seemed vaguely troubled after these liaisons, and I could not for the life of me figure out why. I simply felt lazy and fucked out, basking in the rosy haze which invariably accompanied such things. I could not see why he wouldn’t as well. He seemed to me like a defiled woman sometimes, sitting in a chair and fretfully biting his lip, while I lay in the bed sated and satisfied.

It was easy to attribute it to his depressive personality. But I had seen him with women, once or twice when we had been newly in Paris and had ventured down to the whorehouses together. He hadn’t been particularly enthusiastic, but his melancholia hadn’t touched him then. He was playing with his rosary now, a vacant expression in his eyes, and wretched understanding tugged at the periphery of my thoughts.

“What’s wrong, Nicki?” My voice sounded smaller than I had intended it. It was far from the first time I had asked him this.

His eyes flicked to me, annoyed. “Are you so simple, Lestat? Do you not...” He swallowed his words, and did not speak any further. His nimble fingers worried the rosary a moment more, and then they stilled.

I sat up, throwing the sheet off myself. He looked away from my nakedness. “There’s no reason to be ashamed,” I said gently. Again, not the first time I’d told him this. “We love each other, Nicki, it makes no sense for us to deny ourselves this.”

His words were acid when he spoke. “And to think you might have been a priest. What would you have preached to your flock, hmm? Hedony and sin—“

“Sin!” I shouted. “Enough about sin! We are no more sinners than anybody else! And you know it!”

“I do not know it,” he said miserably. He would not even raise his voice to match mine. That irritated me beyond belief, the way he could not even be prevailed upon to shout. Anger, rage, anything would be better than this flaccid sorrow.

I rolled off the bed and went to him at once. I snatched the rosary from his hand. The string broke, and the little wooden beads scattered in every direction, rolling about on the floor. I stared at him, eyes wide and feral, clutching the bereft crucifix in my hand.

That got a rise out of him. “You heathen!” He shouted, standing up. His eyes were dark with shock. “You imbecile! Have you no shame?”

I felt tears prick in my eyes. I turned away, clenching my fist and feeling the wood of the crucifix dig into my palm. My throat was tightening around my words as I choked out, “It wasn’t any use to you, anyways!”

I raised my arm in the air, to throw the damned thing as hard as I could. I intended to shatter it. But Nicolas slammed into me and threw me to the bed, wresting it painfully from my hands.

I wrestled out of his grasp, panting. I was as heavy as he was, these days, and taller, in spite of how little we managed to eat. His eyes were red as he looked up at me. I thought for a moment that he would relent, and somehow that was more horrible than his rage. I could see the fight leaving him as the tense moments ticked past, and see the indifferent melancholy begin to seep back in. For a terrible, terrifying moment, I imagined wrapping both of my hands around his pale, hard neck, squeezing until he bruised. Until the blood vessels in his eyes burst and his eyes rolled back in his head.

“You think I am evil but—“

“There is no good or evil,” he sneered. “Only good or bad art.”

“So what are _we_ then?” I cried. “Are we—are we _bad art?_ ” Somehow, absurdly, this was the most horrifying prospect of them all.

He turned away, his hair slipping down over his eyes.

I couldn’t bear it anymore. Couldn’t bear to be in his presence. In a huff I found my breeches and stockings on the floor. I did them up, threw on my shirt and my boots, not bothering with the laces. He didn’t stop me. I went to the door, pulled on my coat and left.

I had tried to reflect upon it before, perhaps in an ill-fated attempt to understand him. I was by no means ignorant of the scriptures or the prevailing attitudes. I knew that the fact that he was a man and I was as well was supposed to mean something. It should have felt like damnation. I should have felt the weight of it pressing in on me from the very first night in the inn at the village in Auvergne, when Nicki and I had exchanged our first drunken kisses. It was the first time I had ever kissed a man.

Instead I remembered my giddy walk home that night, the excitement and the joy, as if I had happened upon a precious secret. As if it were a tender discovery all of my own, that I could feel that way. The rough brush of his slight stubble against my face, the broadness of his shoulders as I wrapped my arms around him, clumsy from the drink. His body had been hard and unyielding, so different from the pillowy feel of those sweet country girls I’d rolled about with or my Isabella from the commedia dell’arte. But his lips had been unimaginably soft against my own. All of it was a fortuitous surprise. That my body responded as it had to this beautiful young man was something nearly too good to be true, something I scarcely believed, something like a miracle. I had held the memory of his sanctifying kiss in my heart, and had replayed it over and over in my mind that night as I lay in my bed in the chateau, unable to sleep from excitement. It had not felt like a burden. It hadn’t remotely felt like a burden.

Two of Nicki’s student friends were in the room when I returned, hours later. I noticed the insipid smell of cheap wine and saw two emptied bottles on the desk when I let myself in. Their heads turned to me. Nicki sat on the bed, one sat in the chair opposite him and the other was cross legged on the floor. Their clothes were typically bourgeois: grey vests and linen shirts. One had a red couvrechef tied around his neck in lieu of a cravat.

The one in the chair ( _Mathys_ , I remembered vaguely) sneered at me. “Ah, _la pédale_.”

I scoffed, throwing my coat down. I was certain I’d had more women than he, with that ugly ruddy face of his. I didn’t say this though, the cognac I’d had earlier made my tongue feel slow in my mouth. I glanced at Nicki, who stared tight-lipped at the ground.

I strode right up to Mathys, snatched the wineglass from his hand, and smashed it against the wall. “Get out of our flat,” I said.

The other boy, the one sitting on the floor, giggled and hiccuped. _“Your_ flat?”

Wide-eyed, Mathys watched the dark red stain for a moment. His cheeks were red from the wine, darkened with stubble, his brown hair greasy and half falling in his face. Then he turned his gaze back on me, and it was menacing. He drew himself up to his full height, and I squared my shoulders. Fine, then. If couldn’t fight with Nicki, I would fight his idiotic friends.

“Lestat,” Nicki said. His voice sounded distant. Stupidly I looked at him a moment too long, at the way the candlelight flickered across his fine cheekbones, the sad, helpless look in his eyes.

It was while I was distracted thus that Mathys made his first strike. He was drunker than I was, and shorter, and so it was clumsy and ill-placed, but still I felt pain bloom across my jaw. I stumbled back a few paces, and the two young men chortled.

“Stop!” Nicki rose to his feet finally. “Mathys! Jacques! _Je t'en supplie!_ ”

I gritted my teeth and slammed my shoulder back into Mathys with full force. He stumbled and fell back against his chair, which sent him tumbling to the ground against his friend. I set myself upon them, punching and kicking them. I wasn’t afraid that they were two and I was one. Had I not once killed an entire pack of wolves? I felt invincible.

“Stop! Stop! Lestat! Lestat!” I felt Nicolas against my back, grabbing my shoulders. I fought at him, aiming a final kick to Mathys’ flank before I lost my balance and Nicolas hauled me away. We tumbled back onto the bed, and I wrenched myself away from him. No use for those two imbeciles to see us in such a compromising position. I scrambled back to my feet, and Nicolas put his head in his hands.

Cursing, the two of them ambled to their feet. Mathys looked positively murderous as he clutched at his side with a tight fist. I grinned triumphantly, still panting from the adrenaline. Nicolas glanced at me and then hurriedly got to his feet, throwing his friends their coats and ushering them out the door. I heard him mumble a string of apologies in a low voice.

“You are a lunatic, Nicolas.” Mathys spat some blood onto the floor. “I hope you know that.”

Nicki, to his credit, kept his voice steady. “I know perfectly well.” He closed the door and we heard the sounds of Mathys and Jacques shuffling down the stairs. Then he turned his back to the door and slumped against it. He covered his face with one of his hands. A sob jerked loose from his throat. 

I could not look upon him. I found him insipid, weak, disgusting…I pulled up the chair Mathys had been sitting in and sat in it roughly. I saw Nicki’s violin case, pushed up against the wall. I had half a mind to take it out and smash it. Yes, I could see it. I would take it out, bash it into the floor, watch the wood buckle and splinter. And he would scream, he would cry out as if I had wounded him, and then I would do it to _him_ too, I would destroy him _too_ —

Nicki bent to me, and kissed me tenderly on the mouth. “ _Je t’aime_ ,” he whispered. The candlelight glinted off his reddened lower lip. He blinked once and looked into my eyes, and there was something incredibly soft there, something gentle and proud and sweet. He traced a hand down my cheek.

I thought I might cry. I turned to him and crushed my arms around his waist. I pressed my head to his chest, where I could faintly hear the beating of his heart. _Mon coeur_ , I thought, although I could not bring myself to say it. I hoped my touch was enough to convey it to him. His arms came around me, and held me there.

We washed together, after that. He cleaned the blood from my cheek and my knuckles, and I let him. I watched his face carefully as he did it, but his placid expression belied nothing. Then we tumbled into bed, tugging the flimsy sheet up until we were both covered. It was very cold, and we clung to each other.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered eventually. “I shouldn’t have let them—“

I kissed his fingertips. “Don’t think on it, _mon amour_. They don’t—“ I swallowed. “They don’t know.”

He nodded, surmising what I meant from my meager words. I was grateful for that. He kissed me again and I wrapped myself around him. Our limbs tangled together, and my hand slipped into his in our sleep.

One evening, as we were preparing for the night’s performance, I found myself paused in the doorway to the girls’ dressing room. Angèle sat before her vanity, brushing out her long hair. I’d been meaning to seek her out alone ever since her most recent proposition. Her efforts to pursue me had not lessened since my partial rejection, and I found myself intrigued to see how far she would let our flirtations go.

I could marry a girl like her, I thought. It would still be a scandal for the son of a Marquis to marry a theater actress. But I had already caused so much scandal by running away with Nicki and working as an actor after all. I was debauched, practically an open libertine as far as my father was concerned. Angèle’s long red hair flowed down her back as she brushed it. Beautiful. I could see the swell of her breasts and the slight round of her abdomen beneath her chemise. I wondered how smooth her skin would feel under my hands. I thought fleetingly of claiming the heat between her legs, and the thought aroused me. I could have children with her. I’d always wanted children.

But to give up life with Nicki? The thought pained me like a thorn, I couldn’t even dream of it. He and I were so perfectly in harmony, so perfectly in love. He had already made me happier than I had ever been in my life, and I wanted nothing more than that. Ah yes, I could see it already. In a few years he’d win an audition for the orchestra of the Paris Opera. I would be long past Renaud’s little theater and would tour with a grand troupe of actors in Paris and London and perhaps even America. The Comedic-Francaise would do quite nicely. We would move out of our little room to a proper apartment, in Montmartre perhaps, since Nicki told me that was where all the artists lived, and the bohemians, and there two men could live together as we did without worry. Perhaps I’d prevail upon my mother to come live in Paris, and we would nurse her to health and buy her a splendid apartment of her own, filled with books. He and I would walk arm in arm in the gardens by the Carrousel du Louvre, along the Champs Elysèes, by the Bourse. We’d bicker in cafés, get ludicrously drunk on wine, make love by candlelight. We’d grow old together. We’d continue our conversation forever, talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement.

This was what I wanted, I was sure of it. 

Autumn in Paris was crisp, with cool breezes slicing through the warm air. The heat seemed to linger more than it had in Auvergne, and yet the small passages between buildings made perfect tunnels for gusts of cold air. One afternoon while Nicolas was rehearsing I wandered around the Place du Panthéon near the Sorbonne, where he had once been a student of law. I came across the most beautiful cathedral, so beautiful that I stopped in the street to look upon it. The lower part of the façade was reminiscent of a Greek temple, with an intricate frieze in the pediment. Above that was a delicate rose window. There was a single high bell tower on the left side. It practically glowed in the pale sunlight. I felt something stirring in me, something I’d only felt when I’d been singing in the monastery as a boy, or that I sometimes felt when I watched Nicolas play the violin. It was the appreciation of sublime Beauty, and the desire to participate in it, to add to it, to ameliorate it. I felt myself standing taller in the street.

“Let’s go to mass this Sunday,” I told him over our supper. “I saw the most beautiful church by the Sorbonne, it’s called Saint-Éttiene du Mont.”

“All right,” Nicki said. He smiled at me. “I used to go there often when I was a student.”

“Really?”

“Back when I still believed.” He grimaced. “It _is_ beautiful though. You will like it, you like those sorts of things.”

Nicolas was right; I loved it immediately. We entered through the grand wooden doors borne forth on a wave of humanity. Men and women, young and old, children, those with fine coats and those in mended shawls. Boots with fine buckles. Boots scuffed around the edges. Hundreds of small wooden chairs stood in neat rows over the stone floor, where we would all go to sit together. And then, and then _I looked up_.

I had to crane my neck to see all of the vaulted ceiling, and it drew my eyes up as if they were pulled there. I marveled at the stained glass windows. The perfect symmetry of the arches and the rosettes. The way the morning light filtered through and brought their visages to life. The balcony of the transept wound in a serpentine helix about the columns - I had never seen such fine work of marble before. Each part of the church seemed an echo of the previous, with each geometric shape reflected back and forth in any direction you looked as if you were standing in the center of a double mirror. The intricacy and the intentionality of it all was so overwhelming. It was glorious.

The choir moved me nearly to tears. I remembered my short-lived days at the monastery as a boy. I had loved it there, loved the order and the quiet beauty. But It had been nothing compared to this. This was glory! This was beauty incarnate! I felt that life had meaning again. Surely it must, else how could I be witness to such immaculate order?

Nicki scoffed and rolled his eyes through many of the scriptures in the liturgies and the homily. Whenever the priest would pronounce a word in any vaguely amusing manner, or say anything we found faintly ridiculous he and I would make faces at each other. We had an increasingly low bar for what counted as amusing or ridiculous, and several times nearly broke into fits of giggles. When the elderly woman sitting behind us touched me on the shoulder and shook her head vigorously with disapproval, we resorted to flicking each other below her line of sight.

We sang along to the verses of the Ordinary: _Kyrie_ , _Gloria_ , _Credo_ , _Sanctus_ , finally _Agnus Dei_. My mother knew Latin, but had never seen it fit to teach me. Still, I more or less knew the words from our little services in the Auvergne. This part Nicki enjoyed, I thought. His eyes seemed to light up a bit at the polyphonic music streaming up and up from the organ. His mouth looked magnificent around the Latin words as he formed them with his lips.

But as the service progressed, he grew more and more solemn. I flicked his thigh once, when we were kneeling side by side in prayer, wanting to resume our little game. He elbowed me hard in the side, as if he were supremely annoyed, and it took effort to disguise my wince. He stared straight ahead as we waited in line for communion.

After the mass was over, he spent a long moment staring down at his feet as everyone around us rose to depart. I ruffled his hair, and finally he stood.

“Lestat,” he sighed. He smoothed down my sleeves once, quickly. “Wait here, all right? Or go outside and find us something to eat. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Just wait.” He said firmly. And then he turned around and walked back through the throng of people, back towards the nave.

But my curiosity got the best of me. He’d been acting strange the entire past hour, and the look in his eyes just now had been positively confounding. After a few minutes standing still in the thinning crowd of the central aisle, I went after him. I walked back one of the side isles, past the nave. It was suddenly quiet, so quiet. As if the whole crowd of people leaving the church had not been there, as if something far denser than sound were suspended in the air. I walked quietly, wondering where on earth he had gone.

Then, as I approached the confessionals, I heard low voices. I moved closer to the side of one box, careful to conceal myself behind a vast column.

“Tell me, my child.”

“I have lain with a man.” It was Nicki’s voice, so quiet I had to strain to hear it. I stiffened.

The priest was quiet for several long moments. When it became apparent that Nicki would not say any more, he spoke again, in a slow, poisonous voice. “That is very grave, indeed. As I’m sure you are well aware, my child, you must repent, thoroughly, and remove yourself from such temptations.”

“No—I—you don’t understand.” Nicki’s voice broke. “I first defied my father, when I left my studies of the law to take up the violin. He begged with me not to—and then when it became clear I would not relent, he—he beat me, he tried to break my hands—“ Here Nicki took a shuddering breath, thick with tears. “And I—I knew that was the beginning of my sins, the beginning of my, my fall, but I could not go back from it. I found solace in my—my friend. H-he and I, we ran away to Paris together, and that was the second time I defied my father. I have not seen my father since, and oh, it weighs on me. I live with him now, my—my friend, and I love him. He’s the only one I have.”

The priest had been quiet this whole time. Now a silence hung over them both, punctuated only by Nicki’s soft sobs. The priest’s silence was heavy with disapproval.

“Love as you speak of it is not possible between two men,” he said gravely. “Only sin. And the wages of sin?”

Nicki sniffed. I heard him swallow. “D-death.”

“Yes, my child. The Devil tries to worm his way into the heart of every believer. He is convincing you that you have _love_ for this other man, false love, that what you do with him is not _unnatural_ , _unclean_ , _sinful_.” I could hear his lips curling around these words like they were hot coals. “We must each resist the work of The Devil in our lives. He has already corrupted your soul, in more ways than one. You have great work ahead of you. You must be steadfast in prayer. You must pray for the Lord’s absolution and forgiveness. And I advise you, my child, to reconcile with your father. You must honor and respect him, for it is the will of the Lord. Is it not in the Commandments? Give up this sinful liaison, and return to your family as a man of God.”

Nicki was silent for a long, terrible moment. The only sound I could hear was my own heartbeat, and the faraway echoes of footsteps on the marble floors of some other chapel in the cathedral.

“Yes, Father.” He said at last. His voice was odd, very quiet, very cold. Resigned.

There was a lump in my throat. Despair, yes, but with every passing moment it transformed to anger. I turned and walked away, not caring to disguise the sound of my footsteps against the marble.

I was nearly four blocks from the Cathedral when he caught up with me. He fell into step beside me, out of breath as if he had been running. I pulled my coat tighter around myself and did not look at him.

It seemed he did not know what to say either. We were in silence for many paces. It was not the companionable close walk we were used to, with our shoulders brushing and our arms sometimes hooked around each other. There was a gulf between us. One might have thought we were strangers, had we not walked in parallel on the street. He only spoke once we had crossed the Seine.

“We should get some bread—“

“Fuck you,” I spat out.

I heard him hiss in a breath and let out a short, strangled sort of noise. “I told you to wait for me. You should _not_ have been listening. That was not for you to hear.” His words were quiet, forceful.

“But I did.”

“You have _no respect for privacy, no decency—“_

“You know what, Nicolas? You deserve this hell you think you’re going to,” I snapped.

“HA!” He shouted. A woman standing by a nearby flower stall turned to glare at us. “You have some nerve, Lestat,” he went on, his voice quietening, intensifying. “Some fucking nerve.” It wasn’t like him to swear in public.

We arrived at our flat. I didn’t want to go home; I wanted to go out and get drunk, perhaps seek out the company of one of the many girls from the theater. Anything to soothe this wretched pain. But something bade me to follow him. He bounded up the stairs ahead of me. And then, I grew desperate. I watched his back, watched him move away from me, further and further, and suddenly my throat was tight with fear. _I could not lose him, I could not, I could not I could not—_

I followed him into our room and closed the door behind me. I was frozen against it. I couldn’t even take off my coat. I saw him go about the room, pick up his violin case.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To rehearse.”

“At this time?”

“Yes, Lestat! At this time!” He shouted.

I bit my lip. “Please don’t—“

“What?” His face was red now. “What would you have me do?”

“I love you! Nicki, please, I love you so much!” I had started to cry. The words had come out of nowhere.

He shook his head violently. “We are sinners, Lestat. We are locked together in sin. Every _day_ we live like this, together, we are damning ourselves.”

‘No!” I screamed. “Nicki, you can’t believe those lies!”

He grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me. “We could be _executed_ , Lestat. Just a few years ago, two men were _burned to death_ at the place de Grève, Diot and Lenoir, you must have heard about it. Just like, just like those witches! Do you want to meet the same fate as them? _Do you?_ You and your malady of mortality. You think it will never touch you, but it will! It will! Mark my words, Lestat, it will if we go on like this!”

I shuddered. I remember the public executions I had seen in the place de Grève. The limp, struggling bodies - the manic, senseless cheers of the crowd. I remembered clutching my stomach, nearly vomiting in the street. The darkness threatening to overwhelm me. And _burning_ …I could scarcely imagine a crueler fate. To be burned, for your flesh to disintegrate before your very eyes, God, dear God, I couldn’t imagine it. Again the fear rose up in me, closing around my neck, clouding my vision with darkness. I could taste acid in my throat. I don’t think I had ever been so afraid in my life. Not when my father had beat me, not even when even when I’d been in the midst of fighting those wolves. I felt fresh tears on my face.

“Perhaps it would be fitting,” I said, trying to mask my fear and the void that was spreading inside me, like an inkblot stain. “For us to be burned together like the witches. Is that not how you and I met, after all?”

“Ah, you are impossible!” He shouted. He grabbed me by the throat and then shoved me, hard, so hard that I stumbled. He began pacing back and forth across the room, menacing, like a caged animal.

I rubbed at my neck. My words were acid when I spoke. “We have not come _all this way_ , we have not struggled so much, just for you to—to throw it all away! You want to go _back there_? To Auvergne, where every day was a living hell for us? The priest was right. You are weak and shameful. Still terrified by this specter of your father, like a little boy, like a, like a woman—“

“STOP!” He shouted. He covered his ears with his hands.

“You’re just afraid—”

“ _Of what!_ ”

“—because in Auvergne everything was familiar to you, and here, now, you have doubts. You’re just—“ _Afraid of_ the sin _. “_ —You’re just afraid you will never be a great violinist!”

He inhaled sharply, seething with rage. He drew back and slammed his fist into my face. I felt the pain blossom there, sharp and flaring hot under my skin. It had not been enough to break bone; of course he would not dare use that much force against me, his lover with the pretty face, but I was aware of the spreading heat which marked the beginnings of an ugly bruise. My limbs were on fire, thrumming with energy, aching for this fight which should have happened long ago. He had turned away and I struck his shoulder. It made a dull sickening sound, and he winced in pain. I grinned maniacally. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him towards the wall. I wanted to make him weep. I wanted him to feel the way I did. Which, I suppose, was precisely what he was trying to do as well.

But he wrenched out of my grasp and kicked at one of my legs. I struggled with him for a moment. I was off balance and he threw me to the floor. I crashed into the chair and the back of my head slammed into the ground. Then he was atop me, and he was punching me in the gut, hard, over and over and—The wave of nausea came out of nowhere. The world was closing in on me, and suddenly all I could see were his fists, the look of pure rage on his face. And then I was flinching, trapped in a spastic paralysis and my thoughts plunged into disorder: suddenly I was a small boy again, cowering in a corner from the fists of my father, unable to anticipate when the next blow would come—then I was fighting the wolves again, and then had gotten to me, they were _tearing at me_ , _blocking out the very sun—I would vomit blood soon, I knew I would—if they didn’t—if he didn’t stop—_

I came back to my senses violently - as if the seams of my mind had been ripped and torn. I took a shuddering breath, as if I had been drowning and had finally broken the surface. I could feel pain again, I could feel the pain of what he was doing to me. I surged up against him, grappling with him for a red, terrible moment before I managed to get some leverage against the floor. I wrapped one of my legs around his and shoved him hard below the ribs. He gasped, winded, and I took the chance to push him over, climbing on top of him.

I had pinned him, my hands tight around his throat. I could do it, I thought. I could really do it. I could feel the very pulse of his arteries below my thumbs. So fragile, when he was like this below me. I could squeeze, harder and harder until his face turned purple and the breath left him. He would be gone, gone, and there would be no priest to give him his last rites. Save for myself. He would die right here, in our room, in my arms, locked in our _sacred_ embrace. He would never get his burial on consecrated ground. He would rot in the gutter, or perhaps in my bed, perhaps I would keep him there until his eyes rotted away and his cheeks sunk in and he…he would never get away from me…

He struggled against me, but I could see his movements were pantomime. Tears were streaked across his face and he was only going through the motions of resisting me. I was straddling him. My thighs were clamped tight on either side of his, taut with the exertion of subduing him. Without thinking, I rolled my hips down against his. He was—he was impossibly hard.

And then I kissed him. It was a violent kiss - short and biting.

“ _Am I a devil to you?_ ” I asked.

“ _You_ are not. Sweet Lestat…” Nicki grasped both of my hands in his. My hands were still around his neck. For a moment there was nothing but tenderness in his eyes, and it broke my heart. “But you are The Devil’s work. To me.”

I was stunned by that. I had no words. I got up off him and backed away.

I was incensed that he had believed the priest’s words - nay, that he had believed them all along. I sat upon the edge of the bed, gasping, staring at him.

_I was The Devil’s work._

Nicki sat up slowly, gingerly, as if he was testing his injuries. I _hoped_ I had hurt him. He first propped himself up on his elbows, and then rolled into a sitting position. He favored his right wrist and winced a bit. I hoped he would never recover. I hoped he had shattered his wrist and would never be able to play his violin again.

“Lestat…”

I looked away. The fire was dying in the hearth. Neither of us had remembered to replenish the coals. He coughed, almost a wheeze.

I hoped he would cough up blood.

He clambered to his feet then, and came to me. He touched my chin and I looked at him finally. He looked miserable. His eyes were red and tear-stained, and his mouth was set in a bitter frown. But then he pulled me to him, something dark and desperate in his eyes as they latched on to mine.

“Take me, Lestat,” he said.

We usually didn’t do it this way. For whatever reason, in the year we had been lovers, it was usually me who lay on my back or my stomach for him, him who held me down and had his way with me. Perhaps it was because he was older, more worldly, I don’t know. Perhaps, back then, on the precipice of manhood and still burning with the frenetic energy of youth, I had wanted to be tamed. I wanted to be the Wolfkiller, subdued.

Quite ironic, isn’t it, when you consider what I became.

“Where did you put the oil?” I asked flatly.

He closed his eyes and rubbed at his forehead. Then he nodded towards the bedside table. I retrieved the half empty vial from the drawer and dropped it on the bed.

I went towards him and took him in my arms. He was crying, I realized. I tried to pull back, perhaps from some insurmountable instinct to comfort him, but he fixed my hands to his shirt and demanded I unbutton it. I did, and then he struggled out of the rest of his clothes and tore at mine. I struggled with him a moment, asking him to slow, but he would not. When I was naked, he turned from me; he would not look at me. He merely lay prone. His hands curled around the iron bars of the frame at the foot of the bed, gripping tightly. I could see his knuckles were white. He was trembling.

I was overcome with a sudden tenderness at the sight of him like this before me. He was giving himself to me. It wasn’t quite an apology. It was something much better, something much, much worse. I hugged him from behind and kissed his neck. Then I settled between his spread thighs. His erection was straining down between them, hard and dark with blood. The sight of it made my mouth water; I wanted to suck it. But I had the task before me.

I dripped some oil on my finger and rubbed at his entrance, shadowed by the cleft of his ass. He was so warm there, and he shivered when I touched him. I wished he would turn around; I wanted to kiss him as I did it. But I knew better than to ask. I slipped a finger inside, where he was taut with resistance. He clenched around my finger, hissing. This was painful for him; it had been months since we’d done it this way. But he did not ask me to stop, and I continued my ministrations.

“Just do it already,” he gasped. “Lestat.”

I loved hearing him say my name, in that desperate, strained voice. I leaned back and spread oil over the head and the sides of my cock. When I pushed into him I thought I might come right there and then. The sensation was so intense, so divine.

“Nicki…” I moaned. He felt so _good_. So hot, and tight, and undeniably him. And then there was the sight of it, the sight of me pressing into him, the way he was stretched around me. He had yielded to me. He was silent, although I could see the whiteness of his knuckles as they splayed and clenched the iron. I began to move. I heard him take a shuddering breath, and I wondered if he was crying. I knew I was hurting him.

“ _Harder_ ,” he sneered. He pressed back against me, meeting my thrusts. I rested one of my hands in his hair, pulling experimentally. That made him moan, and so I did it again, harder, harder, _deeper_ , arching his back in the process. There was an undeniable violence to it, and I was in awe of it. The sweat, the trembling of our muscles, the soft sounds coming from his mouth and the place we were joined were merely backdrop to the real subject of the play, to what we both knew this really was.

He moaned wantonly. I knew what he was doing, I was not an idiot. I knew that he was damning himself even more thoroughly than he already deemed himself to be, with me as the instrument. I was the organ. I was the very symbol of his fall from grace.

But it was glorious, this damnation. We both knew it. I _made him_ know it.

“My lord…my lord, the wolf killer,” he gasped. And then he came, and I felt his seed spurt across my hand and his belly and the sheets. I followed not long after, burying myself in him to the hilt, my back arched in sublime pleasure as I emptied all of my pain and rage and desire deep within him.

Afterwards, we lay back against the pillows together. I looked down at our bodies, naked and flushed and entwined over the sheets. The muscles of his thighs and mine, our softening erections, our strapping youthful torsos. I was afraid to speak. I glanced at him. His sweat left an iridescent sheen on his face and chest, and his lips were still swollen and red from the fading arousal. I touched his face, my finger catching on the hint of roughness on his cheek. 

“If goodness does exist,” he panted, “then I’m the opposite of it. I’m evil and I revel in it.”

“Nicki…”

“I thumb my nose at goodness.” He thumbed his own nose, and then mine, and a thin uncertain smile rose on his lips.

“Then so do I,” I said. I kissed his lips, I couldn’t help it, overcome with feeling as I was. I couldn’t bring myself to care that he had used me. I loved him, pure and simple. The smallest sign from him that he was willing to allow his love for me sent me into a euphoria.

But the next day, Nicki was gone by the time I woke up. He spent the entire day _at rehearsal_ , and did not come to my performance that night. I was distraught, and went looking for him. I found him in a nearby tavern, almost raving drunk. I don’t think I ever saw him sober again, after that.

The music he played got darker. Bach Chaconne. Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata. These pieces he repeated every day for hours, sometimes focusing relentlessly on one part. Other times looping incessantly. These he interspersed with his own compositions: writhing messes of notes that seemed dredged up from some place too horrible to imagine.

My life at Renaud’s went on in those final few weeks. I was drawing bigger audiences, was given more and more time on stage. I had sheafs of new lines to learn, and I wouldn’t be able to decipher them without Nicolas. My pride had never allowed me to ask him to teach me to read before. Besides, I knew what he would say. He would feign tiredness, or tell me he was feeling a little sad today, and say he would do it another time. Once, while he was reading my lines aloud for me so I could practice, I had sat on his lap and followed along the page with my finger, as if I knew exactly where he was. He had scoffed and pushed my hand away. _He_ probably found it embarrassing. And perhaps he liked that my ignorance made me reliant on him in this small way. I think he feared that one day I would not rely on him anymore, and that I would leave him.

Sound familiar?

And then, by October, I began to see that deathly white face in the audiences of my performances. It filled me with unspeakable dread and horror. Each time I saw the face, I nearly froze in my performances on stage. I had to force myself, mechanically, to keep dancing, keep talking. There was a column of ice down my spine. My chest was tight and I could smell something metallic in the air, like iron, like the scent of my horse’s blood spilling across the snow.

When I came home one night to tell him of the mysterious face, Nicolas was collapsed in a corner, having drunk himself into a stupor. I shook him and splashed water on his face, and only then did he rouse. A deep melancholy settled over him. Days passed when he wouldn’t get out of bed. He would barely eat, wouldn’t touch his violin. The orchestral director at the theater demanded to know where he was. I told them he was ill, which I suppose was not far from the truth. Renaud told me that if he did not show the next day, he need not bother coming back at all.

As I rose, so did he sink.

I went to find Angèle.

He crawled into bed late very late one night in November, his hands cold on my skin as they crept under my shirt. “Nicki…?” I mumbled, voice thick with sleep.

“Shh,” he whispered. He kissed my face. I felt something hot shoot up from my groin at his touch, as innocent as it was.

“Are you all right?” He was drunk. I could smell the liquor on him.

“I want to fuck you,” he whispered. He drew his parted lips across my cheek, down the bridge of my nose. They hovered against my mouth. I rose up against him to meet his lips in a kiss. He allowed it for a moment, let it become sloppy and messy, and then he pulled away.

He sat back on his haunches on the bed, and swayed from side to side. The moonlight cast an eerie light over his body and cast the planes of his face into sharp relief. He looked like a ghost. No—worse than that. Far worse. His face was white, and for a moment his eye sockets looked sunken in. Like the horrible white face I’d seen watching my every move.

“Are you—“ I couldn’t say it. My voice trembled. “Are you going to leave me?”

“ _Jamais._ ” _Never_. Then he put his hand over my mouth. “Shut up, Lestat.” His voice was rough.

I let him push me back onto the bed. My sleep clothes were loose and came away easily from my body. He settled over me, clumsily undoing the laces of his breeches. Then he reached for the vial of oil.

I stayed his hand. His skin was still ice cold. “Don’t,” I whispered.

I could see the hesitation in his eyes. Somewhere, beneath all the haze of alcohol and the layers of resentment and hatred and madness, he was still my lover. He still loved me. Whatever was left of him didn’t want me in pain.

It hurt, when he did it. A searing, white hot pain, as if I was being split in two. But I gritted my teeth and didn’t make a sound of protest. I wanted to feel it. I wanted to feel him inside me, because if it was the last time I wanted to feel it forever. But the pain was too much—too much—it was too overwhelming. It cascaded over all my senses, made them bleed out into chaos. Then static. I was already so adept at sectioning off regions of my mind, I realized. I could perceive the pain, yes, but I could sever the link to the part of my mind that would react to it. Yes. I could. I could do that. I did it. And soon enough, it was as if the original link was forgotten, disintegrated, gone in the torrent.

I was so far outside of my body; I couldn’t get aroused. In the state he was in I’m not sure he noticed. He moved against me with his eyes screwed shut, gasping loudly as if all the pain was his. He found my hands in the sheets and gripped on to them tightly, as if I were his lifeline.

“I love you,” he said thickly. I realized he was weeping. “I love you, Lestat.”

I reached up and thumbed the tears away from his eyes, and then brought my fingers to my mouth to taste them. Salty like blood. His thrusts were growing more erratic and I knew he would come soon. He pushed one of my legs up and I didn’t even wince. His face screwed up tight and he let out a sharp cry when he came. Then he fell upon me, boneless, and I heard him sob. He rolled off me and curled into himself on the bed, his head in his hands.

I blinked. I watched him weep. Those were bitter tears. They were the final stand of a man nearly resigned to his fate. I stared at the window, watched the moonlight stream in through the curtains. I felt strange. I felt a strange humming in my nerves, as if I was…as if I was being watched. Trapped outside of my body as I was, I thought I was merely being watched by myself, as strange as that may sound. If only it had been true.

In the end, of course, Nicki did not have to leave me. The choice was made for him, one fateful night when the white-faced Magnus robbed me from our bed. Robbed me of my life. And then gave me a new one, the one I am living to this day.

I was forever changed. I remember looking down at myself in horror on the night I was changed. My skin was pale and hard, no longer my own. The web of my veins showed blue and ghastly against my skin. And—and then I remember Magnus’ crypt, of the bodies heaped there in varying states of decay, all in my image…

I resisted for so long. Even in my desperate loneliness, even though my deepest desire was for someone to share in this horror with me, I determined I would not make Nicolas into this monstrous being that I was, because I loved him.

I bought him lavish clothes and a large apartment equipped with a staff. A new violin, the very same one I still have in my possession today. I had my mortal agent buy and send him prostitutes, even though I knew he wouldn’t care for them. I hoped those girls would give him some company, some base human interaction, more than anything else. I could see his mind disintegrating from afar. From the grief, from the loneliness. For the confirmation that he had sinned beyond forgiveness and was now reaping the punishment.

At least he had his violin, I thought. But even this was turning more into an instrument of his damnation rather than his salvation. The compositions he played turned twisted and dark and nearly incomprehensible. It was as if I were watching him fly apart at the seams. And I was helpless. I was helpless. Unable to help him, unable to go to him, unable to soothe his suffering and his heartbreak. Unable to even tell him _why_.

I was Orpheus vanquished. Or perhaps he was.

And when I gave him the Dark Gift,

We couldn’t stand the sight of each other for the pain. It did not suit Nicki to be dead. I imagine it doesn’t suit many.

 _I hate you,_ he had snarled. _I cannot bear the sight of you_.

_Au revoir, Lestat._

And then, within 10 years, he was dead.

I need not explain the metaphor any further. Reader, if by now you do not know why, what any of this had to do with Louis’ documentary, then I’m not sure what more I can say. And yet I have felt the urge to spell it out this far. I suppose that’s because when you’ve lived as long as I have (of course, none of you will), you’ll find far too many conflicting metaphors vying for your attention. Too many ways to dissect and analyze and tell the story of your own life. And each new story runs the risk of being more horrifying than the last.

Yet perhaps the tragedy is difficult to discern. Perhaps in every possible future, our relationship would have disintegrated under the weight of its own entropy. I will never know. Yet shouldn’t I have had the _chance_ to know?

You know how it ended for him. Bloodied stumps where hands should have been. Fire, burning preternatural flesh. And my heart, struck with its first fatal wound, forever colder. It was the first blow, on its descent towards ice.

And were we not both killed by fire, just as he predicted we would be, if we carried on living as we had? That is perhaps the cruelest irony. Him by choice, and me at the hands of Claudia and Louis, my own family. Best not to dwell on that, though. It is too painful a thought.

After all, they had their reasons.

_I will be the hero of this, you understand me? I will never grieve for myself._

You’ve heard quite enough. Let us return to the scene in my living room. I finally emerged from the wreckage of my memories while playing Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor on the piano. Melodramatic? Sure. Though that is more Louis’ department. Sure enough, I saw him stand in the doorway, watching me carefully. He looked like a dark specter, the outline of his exquisite dark-clothed form bleeding into the shadows. Only his stark face belied his position.

My eyes moved idly across the piles of sheet music chaotically strewn across the top of the piano, the music stand, the table, the floor. The scene of an exorcism. That was how it must look to him, and I shuddered. There was just so _much_ , spanning so many eras, so many failed lifetimes. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the D Minor violin partita, Chopin and Liszt, the few Paganini caprices I’d been able to sight read without too much effort, Dvorak’s Romanza, Ernst’s The Last Rose of Summer, Ysaÿe’s sonatas. Chausson’s _Poème_. This last one was a piece written more than a hundred years after Nicki’s death, and yet I knew that had he been alive he would have loved it. It had a sinuous undercurrent of darkness which was barely scaffolded beneath the structure of the notes.

Louis said, in his book, that I played the piano without feeling. That I was outside the music, playing with a blind mechanical technicality which relied on a vampire’s senses alone. Never drawing it up from within myself as a real musician would have, as Nicki had. I suppose he said this to underscore my lack of humanity, so that he could feel slightly more justified about setting me on literal fucking fire.

I wondered if it were true. Even when I’d been a rock musician, most of my success had relied on the fact that I understood showmanship. That I had sufficient technical command over my voice and the ability to write palatable songs was of secondary importance. I suppose that’s why I was playing tonight, I thought. I was searching for it…if it was even there…I was turning all these notes over and over beneath my fingers, sifting through my fractured memories, trying to see if there was but a shred of human feeling left in me. To see if anything remained of the boy who had loved Nicolas in Paris.

_That’s it, just a little more reach in the left hand…_

_B minor chord, yes, now add the seventh, linger but don’t linger, make up for the rubato to keep time…_

_Gentle on the right hand, follow the line of the music, descending, yes, paint it with some color…_

But it was all in vain. It was all just a pale imitation of humanity. A mere parody of feeling. I had lost something – I had sustained some vital loss, and yet, and yet I could not even find the word to articulate what it was.

As the final plaintive chord of the Prelude rang out, darkness upon darkness, I felt a wave of despair overcome me. I closed the lid over the keys and put my head in my hands.

Hadn’t I also been playing the piano that fateful night Claudia tore a knife into my throat?

I felt something soft settle over my shoulders. I turned and Louis was there, holding a blanket. He had draped it over me. A useless, ineffectual gesture, but it was not unwelcome. “Have you eaten yet?” He murmured.

I gave him a wry smile. “Not yet.”

He merely smiled and sat down next to me on the edge of the piano bench. I scooted over enough to make room for him, but not enough that we weren’t still touching. I felt his arm come around my waist beneath the blanket and squeeze gently.

“What’s all this?” I asked. “Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but…”

His eyebrows quirked. “Am I not allowed to take care of you?”

“I don’t—“ I swallowed my retort in surprise as he embraced me. His silken hair covered my face.

He pulled back. “Lestat. You’ve been playing all night.” He took hold of my hand, examining my fingers. They were perfectly smooth, naturally. If I had been mortal, they might have been red and sore from the night’s exertions. His brow creased again. “Are you alright?”

I pulled my hand back. I scoffed. “I can do as I please. It’s not as if you don’t waste away entire nights with your books.”

“No need to get thorny,” he sighed. This, too, was a new thing between us. The relenting. The fact that we didn’t have to pull at the threads of every single conversation until they unraveled into bitter arguments. Louis looked to the precious violin lying in its case on the table, rosin dust fresh on its strings. “I just…I know you. Do you want to talk about it?”

 _No_ , I almost said automatically. But I hesitated.

“Did I—did something I said earlier upset you?”

“No, of course not.” Which was a profoundly stupid thing of me to say really, since he knew almost every little thing he said over all our years together irritated me. That I admitted exception was far too telling.

I looked at the clock. We had another hour, at most, until dawn.

“You can talk to me, Lestat,” he said softly, coaxingly. “If not each other, then who else can we confide in?”

Ha. Him and me, confiding in each other. As if we didn’t have a centuries long history of deception and betrayal between us.

I swallowed. “Just thought of a boy I loved once, long ago.”

His eyes flicked to the violin and back, unsubtle. “Nicolas.”

I did not recall having mentioned Nicolas to him. “H-how did you know?”

He arched an eyebrow. “I’ve read your books. And last night we were just—“ He pursed his lips and shook his head. “You can be so dense, sometimes, it’s unbelievable. Unfathomable, really.”

I scowled.

“Or perhaps you are just defensive,” he said, touching my chin.

“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” I snapped, jerking my chin away.

“Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me what you were thinking about.”

I swallowed, and gave him a hard look. “Perhaps I’ll write about it and let you read it.”

“Ah yes,” he sighed, looking away. “I suppose that’s really the only way you and I can communicate anything of import.”

“I wonder who set that precedent,” I said, and waited for his predictable retort of ‘ _That’s rich, coming from you_.’ It didn’t come. That surprised me. The usual pattern of our arguments was if nothing else safe and familiar, and without it I felt strangely off-balance.

He was silent for a long moment, and ran his hand down the curve of the side of the piano. His hand was so slender and finely made. Of _course_ it was, I thought. He was mine, I had made him.

“Can you try now, Lestat? I want to know. I want to know what happened, beyond what you said in your book. I want to know…I want to know what made you do all this tonight.” He gestured to the room around us, his eyes passing over the flurry of sheet music. It almost looked like there had been an explosion. A disaster zone. So many pieces of flimsy paper, each containing some fragment of a soul. Perhaps each one was a victim, someone alive whom I had drained and discarded in vain, hoping in vain to find meaning in. “What made you think of him?”

“Jealous?” I asked bitchily.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” I said, crossing my arms.

He raised an eyebrow. “Try me.”

“I cried so much back then,” I remarked. I don’t know why. I don’t know why, of all the things I could have said, that was what came out of my mouth. “That’s still in my memory. In front of him, in front of anyone. Especially him. I hardly ever cry anymore. Even by the time I met you, I don’t think I ever let you see me cry.”

“You didn’t,” he agreed.

“We were so innocent,” I whispered. “He didn’t deserve what happened. _I_ didn’t—" My voice broke and I could all of a sudden see a wavering pinkness on the margins on my vision. No. I would not cry. I was not that pathetic.

Louis took me in his arms. “Of course you didn’t deserve it, Monsieur. It was a tragedy, what happened to you.”

“I wanted to be good,” I whispered. So soft. I hadn’t really intended for him to hear it.

He nodded. He kissed my cheek tenderly. “I know.”

I scoffed. Pulled away. Embarrassed at my weakness and what I had admitted to him. I hadn’t cared about goodness for centuries, literally. It was a weak, stupid, _mortal_ idea. “It doesn’t _matter_. It’s done, done and dead and gone, and I’m a monster, and I always was.”

“It does matter,” he said finally. He swallowed. I noticed that he ignored my proclamation of myself as a monster. Perhaps that was because we both knew it was true and he had no desire to question it. “You think you are invincible, Monsieur. And you are, in a manner of speaking. We may live forever,” he went on, “but we carry the pain of centuries with us. We have no way to let it go…”

He was silent then, and I didn’t need to read his mind to know what he was thinking of. He was thinking of _her_. I had to come up with something else to say, to distract him, and quickly.

“The thing is, Louis, no matter how much I am loved, or desired, or even worshipped, I shall always remain an outsider. That was true since my youth and it shall remain true forevermore. Even when I was on the stage - at the Boulevard du Temple or Cow Palace, all the same. It felt—I have always—” I choked again on my words. Stupid. _Stupid._

He sighed. “When I was living in San Francisco in the 1960s—”

“Yes, why _did_ you go there?” I interrupted. I knew, or at least I had some idea, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask him. I was imagining him getting off a train at Caltrain Depot in a pink and green paisley shirt, with orange-tinted aviators and corduroy pants. Some of those items were probably anachronistic for the time period, as I hadn’t experienced those decades. Didn’t matter. The beautiful picture was what was important. Oh, how I would have loved to have seen him then.

He shook his head. “Just listen. When I lived on Divisadero Street, and I lived there for nearly 20 years, I met many young people who lived there. People like Daniel, and many others. Not all of them were my victims. I just liked to observe them. I would sit in bars and cafes in the Castro district and watch them. They were not unlike us in some ways; they came alive at night. They would come in twos or threes, or perhaps alone, hunting for a different kind of sustenance.

“I supposed I liked the way they lived,” he went on. He glanced at me. “And when I went to their clubs—“

“You went _clubbing_ , Louis?”

His cheeks flushed slightly. “You know I have always liked dancing,” he said with a frown.

I laughed out loud. I tried to imagine him in a mesh shirt or perhaps a crop top, and tight flared pants. Glitter across his eyelids. It was a splendid image. “Oh, that’s _so rich_ , darling. We _must_ go together some time.”

“Well,” he said with some difficulty. “Perhaps.”

“Don’t let me distract you,” I said somewhat wickedly, glad that I’d turned the tables and made him tell _his_ story instead of telling my own as he had asked. That’s the wonderful thing about Louis. He really _can_ talk, once you get him going, and as long as you permit him to coat every word he utters with a vague sense of disdain. His voice has a lovely cadence and he knows it. “Go on.”

He glanced at me and then away. He pursed his lips. “I suppose the night was a solace for them. There weren’t many other places they could go, naturally, and be in such company. And they dressed so brazenly, without regard for anyone outside the doors. Men in full makeup and women’s clothes, clones with their jeans and mustachios, hippies too, at that time, in their tie-dye and false glasses. In fact the variety and ornamentation of the dress rather reminded me of our own time, with colors and fabrics that so overwhelmed me, as you know very well. Of course, these men did not dress to display status as we did. In fact, quite the opposite.”

“And women,” I reminded him. “There must have been women like that, too.”

He nodded. “Yes, although they tended to have their own separate places to congregate.”

“How did you pick your victims?”

“At 2AM or so, after the bars closed, the men who remained would line up on the sidewalk, waiting for someone to take them home. After that it was easy enough. It took hardly any convincing to get one to follow me into a dark alley. They called it the Meat Rack, of all things.” He grimaced.

I considered this. I wondered if it had always been as clinical and detached as he’d indicated. He had never been one to play with his victims, but…I couldn’t help but wonder. He certainly couldn’t have killed _all_ of the ones he had met, or even most. Had he ever danced with those men, kissed them, whispered softly into their ears? Had he ever actually gone home with any of them, let them have him in the mortal way? Had he always then killed them, or had there been some with whom he’d formed some lasting friendship with, or that thing friendship was a euphemism for? I knew I could not ask him these things directly, however. He’d no doubt become furious with me, that I dared insinuate such a thing, and our conversation would be over.

“I didn’t stand out much, in those places,” he went on. There, the...starkness of my skin, my strange eyes, my accent or my manner - it was all just a _look_. And there were many who were far more conspicuous than me. I didn’t...I suppose I didn’t have to worry about how I appeared. And that was a comfort to me.”

I couldn’t imagine Louis being inconspicuous. His beauty can draw every pair of eyes in any room. The way he moves, smooth and graceful to a fault. The way he will lift his chin slightly if you address him, the way a smile curls gently about the corners of his lips. The way that if he chooses to look upon you, he fixes his irresistible emerald gaze on you in such a way that you feel you would do anything in that moment to make those eyes light up with some small joy. And it is not just me - anyone who has met him could attest the same. But he has always been rather oblivious to this fact.

“And I think that’s what allowed me to go out in the first place, in a way. That...anonymity. For once, I let my guard down.”

“Yes,” I agreed haughtily. “If you thought anyone might _dare_ perceive you, you’d have just stayed inside reading for years on end.”

His mouth twisted, but he otherwise ignored my comment. “And I recognize the irony of it. That to even suggest that I was there to seek refuge is in some level patently absurd; I was a killer, and I was there to hunt them, I was not some forlorn outcast innocent looking for somewhere to belong.”

 _Ah, but you were_ , I wanted to say. _You are, Louis, and you have always been._ But I did not say it. It would have been too painful.

“And sometimes, I got a sense of the danger they were in. Police would come, raid the places, make arrests. I had no fear of them myself, of course, but I could _feel_ the fear of the others. I could smell it.

“It reminded me of...” He swallowed thickly. I watched his throat move. “Of when we three were living in New Orleans, the stories we would make up. How she was my daughter, or yours, and one of us had a late wife, and the other was his brother or brother-in-law. Things like that. Do you remember?”

I was a bit startled that he had brought this up again. I knew how it wounded him to do so. The three of us, the unholy family, Louis and Claudia and me. There had been times of happiness and laughter, yes, but they were shadowed by pain and torment. For both of us, yes, but especially for him. I remembered the times he was referring to. We had been such frequent patrons at the theater and the opera house and the balls, and Claudia had had all her tutors, any of whom could have begun to ask questions. Here was this little girl, the ward of two gentlemen business partners who shared a flat and were too-often seen in each other’s company. We were conspicuous to say the least, despite all our efforts to maintain discretion. And some of them _had_ asked questions, I remembered. Brash and disdainful as I had been, I had pretended not to care and had left most of the task of smoothing things over to Louis. I spun the stories, perhaps, but I left them to him to tell. He had feared, perhaps rightly so, that someone might try to take Claudia away from us. He had resented me for it, and I in turn had resented that very resentment in his eyes. I recognized it. He blamed me, just like Nicki had. I was the very reason we were so unnatural, the reason we had to hide.

“I remember,” I said cautiously. “I hated that and you hated that. The…the act. But for very different reasons, I imagine.”

He frowned at me. “Perhaps not so different.”

My throat had grown tight again. I collected myself, with effort. My voice was sharp when I spoke. “And _what_ , Louis, is the result of this _grand anthropological study_ of yours?”

“My point is...” he swallowed, and he got a strange, faraway look in his eyes. He took one of my hands and held it, brushing his thumb over the blue veins on the back of my hand. He sighed. “I understand. To some degree, though perhaps not perfectly, what it had been like for you as a mortal man. When you were living in Paris.

“And I understand,” he whispered, looking pointedly into my eyes. “…some measure of what you lost.”

 _Of what I lost_. I lost Nicki. And my humanity, though that felt rather secondary in this context. But what, in particular, had he lost? I wondered at first if he were referring to Claudia, as I knew how fixed that point of reference was his mind. The hurt which overshadowed all others. But no...it couldn’t be that. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gone on about San Francisco, about all the gay bars and how he’d felt observing the lives of our fellow outcasts. _Armand_ , perhaps? A flare of jealousy. Had he been thinking of losing _Armand_? One of my fists clenched. But Louis had left Armand decades before, and he’d had his own separate reasons for resenting him. That left…that left only me.

_Me._

I stared at him.

“Louis,” I whispered. My vision was again streaked with pink around the edges. “Did you miss me, when you were there? In San Francisco?”

He faltered. I could see him turn inward on himself, could see the little crease that formed between his eyebrows.

He was silent so long I thought he just wasn’t going to answer. _Stupid_ , I thought. _Stupid question._

But then his eyes found mine again. “I was there _because_ I missed you,” he whispered.

I couldn’t speak. I thought of Montmartre, and Nicolas, and the life we might have had together there. The life _Louis_ and I might have had, had I not ruined it all with my foolishness.

“Come, Monsieur,” he said gently. He stood and offered me his hand. “It’s almost dawn. Let’s go to bed.”

I took it, and went with him into the bedroom. I sat on the bed and watched him go about his routine. He undressed and changed into his sleeping clothes, a pair of monogrammed black silk pajamas I had bought him about a year ago. I watched his graceful, half self-conscious movements with fascination. The way he laid down his discarded clothes with care before folding them: first his sweater, then the belt, then the trousers and the shirt. Finally his socks. The way he turned away from me in the brief moments he was naked, although he made no attempt to leave the room or prevent me from looking upon him, as he had in the many years past. He pulled the nightshirt over his head in a smooth motion, somehow knowing he was on display and yet refusing to acknowledge it. He ran a hand through his silken black hair. Then he went into the bathroom and washed his face, a small mortal habit that somehow still seemed so endearing.

He came back to me and saw that I hadn’t moved. He cocked his head in question.

“You’re beautiful,” I told him. _Consummately beautiful_ , I thought. _Looking upon you gives meanin_ g _to my un-life_. Insipid words. I did not say them.

He smiled faintly. “Are you going to sleep in those tight jeans?”

I shrugged, raising an eyebrow. “You can take them off if you object.”

He laughed, softly, and _oh_ , it was glorious to hear his laugh. He ran his gentle hands through my hair and kissed my forehead. I tried to raise my face to his. But he released me and climbed over me to his side of the bed. He lifted the covers and settled down under them. “Turn off your lamp, Monsieur,” he whispered.

I sighed and stood up, removing my clothes as he had. I left them in a pile on the floor. I felt his eyes on me. I stretched languidly, showing off my body in all it’s unclothed glory, and then turned to face him. Sure enough, he snatched the book on his bedside table and studied the cover very intently. _Most_ intently. Satisfied, I turned off the light and climbed into bed beside him.

I sighed. Nicki. Me. Paris. Louis. San Francisco. This mortal disease which couldn’t touch us. Music, fire, and death, and blood. Always the blood. What did it all mean?

Another memory came, lying in bed with Louis at Rue Royale. He had been my reluctant lover for several years by that point. We had both been sated from the blood swoon, and he had read to me aloud. Merely to practice our performance for Claudia, he’d insisted. _If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this. My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss._ He had looked me in the eyes then, shyly. And then unconsciously, if he were unaware he was doing it, he licked his lips.

I suppose that was how Louis came to think of it. A gentle sin. One that paled in comparison with all of his other, graver sins. I suppose he still thinks of it that way today. To him, it’s all right to sin if it eats you up inside enough.

But how far must it eat you up? Is centuries of abject depression sufficient? Or must you burn in flames? Or must you wither and waste away and die, like those walking skeletons on the television?

“If loving you is a sin, I will never repent,” I declared. I raised my chin a bit, watching him in the darkness. I said this in part to challenge him. I knew very well his position on such matters. It was not all that different from what Nicolas’ had been, although tempered with time. My Louis. My perfect tormentor.

He surprised me. He just wrapped his arm around my neck and kissed me. It wasn’t just a light brush of his lips against mine. It was a full kiss.

I pulled back. “Louis…?”

He shook his head and kissed me again. This time I didn’t resist. I pushed closer, tightening my grip on him and pushing my fangs into the soft open heat of his mouth. How lucky that damned though I am, I am allowed this bit of heaven.

“I love you,” he said.

We curled around each other, ensconced safely in our room by double locked windows and three layers of blackout curtains and my hardened heart. He fell asleep before I did, his breathing fading to nothing. I brushed a kiss over his eyelids.

“Je t’aime,” I whispered.


End file.
